After only a short span of time, the next release on NLarn is finished.

The most significant change is the availability of a MacOS X installer.
NLarn uses SDLPDCurses on OS X, which allows to scale the window; the font size will change with the window size. It is known to work on Snow Leopard and Lion. As it is a 64-bit application it will not work on older Macs. Currently the ‘\’ key (which will open the list of discovered items) is not recognized (at least with a german keyboard layout), the reason is under investigation. If anybody has an idea how to solve this, I’d be more than glad to hear from you!

Except this, most predominantly a lot of bug fixing and mending was undertaken, but still some features were added. Saved games created by previous versions are obsolete.

I’m happy to announce another iteration of NLarn. This release focuses on bug fixes and balancing. Some of the changes made this version incompatible to the previous version’s save files.

Download it today and spend all your free time playing it, but don’t blame me if you miss your next exam.

Changes in this release are:

More armour:

a simple cloak.

Boots of Speed (unique).

Cloak of Invisibility (unique).

Weapons can break during combat. The number of broken weapons is counted and shown in the postmortem.

Make damaged items less effective: burnt, corroded or rusty weapons and ammunition will now cause less damage, damaged armour will protect less.

Redesigned armour and weapon distribution in the dungeon. The elven chain is more heavy and unique.

Reduced the availability of items in the store.

Replaced the amulet of invisibility by the amulet of sustainment, which protects against attribute draining attacks.

The bank pays less interest on player’s savings.

Increased school course prices. The course prices now depend on the length of the course, thus maintaining the balance between benefit and cost.

Raise item identification and repair prices. The prices will now depend on the item’s value. For lower-prices items the minimum charge stays at 50 gold. Repair prices for item stacks depend on the amount of items.

Generate monster item adequate to dungeon level. Previously troglodytes on dungeon level 3 could carry an amulet of power, which was not desirable. Another effect of this change is that monsters in the deep dungeon levels carry more interesting items.

Do not erode items inside containers.

Implemented scroll of hold monster. This scroll was in error set up as a scroll that affects the player, and as the effect “hold monster” has no effect on the player, this mistake went unnoticed until now.

More than a year has passed, every minute well spent bringing forth the evolution of NLarn. Thus it is my pleasure to announce a new release of NLarn, awaiting your download on a mirror close to you.

The changes in this milestone on the long and winding road to the perfect roguelike are:

A monastery in town can heal, remove curses and cure the most common diseases for a little fee. Some special items are available in the monastery’s shop.

Implemented a “storage room” at the player’s home. It is now possible to store items at home and take them later. The value of items stored there is added to the player’s score when the game ends.

Scribes in the school of Larn can write any scroll on blank scrolls.

Stop automatic movement or resting as soon as a monster enters the field of vision, not only when it is on a field next to the player. This should give the player more time to react accordingly.

Spells that cause effects to the player now extend the effect amount or duration up to (spell knowledge level * base value). Messages are displayed to reflect that an effect has been extended or that the maximum has been reached.

Added an intelligence requirement to learning spells and extended the requirement for casting spellst to 3 * spell level.

Implemented raising taxes:
For every difficulty level above zero the player has to pay 5% of the income, i.e. money deposited on the bank, item sale revenue and interest as taxes. The maximum tax percentage is 20%.
Added statistics about paid taxes to the obituary.

Added traps to containers. Every generated container has a 33% chance of being trapped. Trap effects are:

itching (forces the player to remove the armour),

sickness (reduces the chance to hit)

clumsiness (forces the player to drop the weld weapon)

slowness

Implemented searching for traps on the ground or on containers.
Searching is also useful to examine the surroundings while blinded.

Containers known to be trapped are displayed as e.g. “trapped bag”.

Enhanced targeting mode:

target the closest monster if no previous selection has been made.

switch between visible monsters with SPACE.

remember the last targeted monster for subsequent targeting.

remember the monster last hit with a direct attack.

Added ranged weapons and ammunition (fire with ‘f’).

Added new item slots: secondary weapon and quiver.

Enabled swapping primary and secondary weapon (‘x’).

Implemented a “paperdoll”, a list of all equipped items (‘TAB’).

Implemented thwrowing of potions (‘t’).

Most potions now work on monsters.

Made the potion of holy water dangerous for undead monsters.

Thrown or fired items will be picked up automatically regardless of autopickup settings.

Added a command (M) to cast the previous spell again.

It is now possible to pay with money stuffed in carried containers.
The leprechaun can now to steal money hidden inside carried containers.

Tweaked the behviour of the townsfolk. They will no longer walk around like drunk, do important town people business and only talk when the player is outside a building.

Started to work on summoned monsters:

summoned monsters can follow the player,

do not impact automatic movement,

its possible to swap positions with them,

they disappear after some turns,

and killing them gives no experience points.
This is a work in progress and not at all completed.

Added monster’s weapon to monster’s description.

Implemented a mana drain trap.

Added dynamic help to the inventory dialog.

Messages and dialogs can now be coloured, some already are.

Spell rays or blasts now have differen colours.

Modified effect list display on the right side of the screen:

unique entries only

positive effects coloured cyan

negative effects coloured magenta
** fading effects coloured red

Door glyphs now depend on the position of the door.
For closed horizontal doors, it is ‘-’, for vertical doors ‘|’. Opened doors are displayed as ‘/’, but for double doors they become a pair of ‘/’ and ‘\’.

Reduced availability of rings in store at game start.

Generate amulets starting on level 6 and do not generate a ring every time generating an amulet failed; choose a random item type instead.
This should reduce the excessive amount of rings (“ring spam”) available in the game.

Toggling the visibility of the entire map in wizard mode with ^V.

Redefined quite a lot of keys, the most important being:

‘S’ -> ‘CTRL-S’ (save)

‘Q’ -> ‘CTRL-Q’ (quit)

‘T’ -> ‘V’ (travel, silly memory hook: voyage)

As usual, some bug squashing included in the process of bringing forth this version:

Purge dead monsters after player’s extra moves (fixes a nasty crash bug that would occur when the player is faster than an attacked monster).

Only curse-id blessable items when dropping them on an altar.

Fixed weight calculation for stackable items.

Do not mention stationary object on tiles entered while blinded.

With such great changes comes sacrifice: games saved by previous versions on NLarn are no longer valid with this iteration. Also some knowledge about the game might be obsoleted, as numerous key bindings have changed. When in doubt, consult the builtin help.

We are happy to announce a new version of NLarn. After the last version was quite crash-prone, this release fixes all the bugs we could find and also incorporates a lot of fixes for minor issues. Thanks to everybody who provided feedback. We really appreciate your help!

Saved games from versions 0.6 are compatible with this version. If you have installed a previous version with the Windows Installer package you can simply run the new installer and install over the previous version.

Changes

Several improvements to auto-travel.

Permanently display the item description in the inventory.

Modified behaviour when picking up items:
‘,’ just gets the item
‘g’ asks for the amount to pick up
Reported by Xecutor.

Fixed bugs

Allow using numpad direction keys for fast movement with num lock
off on Windows.

Offer only items that can be blessed or cursed for curse removal or
blessing.

Delete the player’s memory of the map when successfully casting ‘alter
reality. Reported by Michael Ax.

Fixed the scroll of genocide monster. Reported by Michael Ax.

Interpret ‘j’ and ‘k’ as mnemonic letters in the spell casting dialog
when another letter has been entered before.

Abort spawning new monsters when a map is fully crowded.
Recalculate number of monsters on a map when restoring a saved game.
Previously, an unlimited number of monsters has been created when
restoring a game frequently. Reported by Peter Casey and Michael Ax.

Changes in this version:

General

Changed the flow of game time management and made actions
interruptable. The result of an action that takes multiple turns
is revealed after elapsing the required number of turns.

Stats are now chosen from one of four fixed stat packages with high
points in strength, constitution, dexterity and intelligence,
respectively. At game start, the player is prompted to choose one or a
random character stat set. This choice can be defined on the command
line or in the ini file.

Nuked the charisma stat.

Added an auto-travel feature which allows to select a target with ‘T’
(features can be selected by their glyph) and to continue travel
interrupted by e.g. a monster with ‘C’.

Automated saving points allow continuing games after crashes.

Integrated Lua interpreter into the game. Moved monster data to external
lua file.

Movement speed is reduced when burdened. When going down a level while
burdened, damage may be caused.

Give a warning if the effects levitation, wall-walk or protection are
about to time out.

Use inverted colours to highlight stationary objects or traps with
items on them.

The statistics which are collected during the game play have been
enhanced. A new statistics counter, “acts of vandalism”, has been added,
which counts destruction of walls, statues etc. via vaporisation, and
also all those looted thrones.

Added some new fortune/speech phrases.

Spells

Make spell casting success depend on Int, spell level and knowledge.

Magic missile is now a single-target spell, and sonic spear has been
upped to level 2.

Lightning deals double damage against flying monsters. Player also
takes double damage from lightning while levitating.

Make finger of death less likely to succeed against undead or demons.

Make polymorph less likely to succeed the higher the monster level.
A polymorphed monster that can’t survive in its current place gets
killed.

Tweaked the spell “alter reality”.

Redesigned the spells “phantasmal forces” and “scare monsters”.
Phantasmal forces affects a single monster, scare monsters affects all
monsters that surround the player.

Monsters

Modified the monster generation to have a more interesting mix of
monsters on a level, including out-of-depth monsters.

Made some monsters significantly more rare.

Tweaked monsters’ gold property to make gold drops less reliable.

Added ranged attacks: hell hounds and red dragons breathe bursts of
fire, the green dragon spits poison and the platinum dragon can use its
psionic attack at a distance. Gaze attacks are now possible at a
distance with one third of their base chance.

Xorns can pass through walls, water lords can swim.

The ziller now has a random stat loss attack. The assassin beetle now has
the poison attack. The green urchin and the lama nobe can now cause
blindness.

Hell hounds, red dragons and demon princes are resistant to fire, some
monsters have sleep or poison resistance.

Make monsters regenerate more often.

Adjust some monsters’ colours, get rid of dark grey monsters.

A nymph will only steal a random amount of an item when the player
has a larger number of that item.

Populate the town with town people. Eradicate fortune cookies in favour
of the talkative town people.

Items

New amulet type: reflection. Reflects breath and gaze attacks.

Add new potion “recovery” healing stat drains, including dizziness.

Added a “potion of levitation”, which allows to float over water or lava.

Improved blessed scrolls of magic mapping and potions of instant healing:
a blessed scroll of magic mapping now also reveals all traps on the
level, and a blessed potion of instant healing also heals poison,
confusion, and blindness.

For blessed genocide scrolls, allow to choose out of same-glyph monsters.

Blessed scrolls of enchant armour/weapon now repair damage and may give
a bonus enchantment.

Uncursed identify scrolls allow identifying up to three items, averaging
at two. Blessed scrolls affect all carried items, as before.

Improve the scroll of “create artifact”: now only generates amulets,
rings, books, potions or scrolls.

Life protection is only permanent with blessed scrolls.

Blessed time warp scrolls are more likely to go farther back.

Change potions of plain water to holy water, which enables the player
to bless items.

Refuse to use books, scrolls and potions which are known to be cursed.

When wearing cursed armour, its curse status is identified immediately.

If a carried container is destroyed, its contents spill on the floor.

Added a more detailed item description for some item types.

Levels

Added rivers and lakes. Spells can now be cast across water and lava,
and flying monsters can cross it. If a monster is killed over water/lava,
all carried items get destroyed, except for the unique items which get
teleported elsewhere on the level.

Overhaul altar prayer. Make altar donations also cure poisoning
and other afflictions, including stat loss other than strength or
dexterity.

Added some special effects when vaporising fountains or altars.

Display remembered traps in their colour, now different by type.

Pits actually trap player and monsters and restrict vision while
trapped.